Today
at AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services introduced two new services to
help companies manage business transactions that require full
auditability. Amazon QLDB is a transparent, immutable, and
cryptographically verifiable ledger for applications that need a
central, trusted authority to provide a permanent and complete record of
transactions (for example, supply chain, financial, manufacturing,
insurance, and HR). For customers who want to build applications where
multiple parties can execute transactions without the need for a
trusted, central authority, Amazon Managed Blockchain makes it easy to
create and manage scalable blockchain networks using the popular, open
source Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric frameworks. With a few clicks in
the AWS Management Console, customers can set up a blockchain network
that can span multiple AWS accounts and scale to support thousands of
applications and millions of transactions.

Customers looking to implement blockchain technologies are typically
trying to accomplish one of two things. Some need a centralized ledger
that records all changes or transactions and maintains an immutable
record of these changes (for example, tracing the movement of an item
through a supply chain network, tracking the history of credits and
debits in banking transactions, or validating incidents filed against an
insurance claim). This ledger is owned by a single trusted entity and is
shared with any number of organizations that are working together. To do
this today, customers can use relational databases, or they can use the
ledger technology in one of the open source blockchain frameworks.
Neither solution is optimal. Relational databases aren’t built for
immutable, cryptographically verifiable ledger entries, so customers
must build custom audit tables and audit trails. And, there is no way to
verify that no unintended changes were made to the data. Using the
ledger in a blockchain framework may give customers an immutable history
of data changes, but comes at the cost of the heavy lifting to set up a
full blockchain network with at least two nodes and all of the
associated access control configuration. Because there are limited
database Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) within the blockchain
frameworks it is challenging to create tables, index, and query data.
Finally, blockchain frameworks are decentralized and require consensus
from members in the network before committing new transactions to the
shared ledger, which significantly slows ledger performance.

Amazon QLDB is a new class of database that provides a transparent,
immutable, and cryptographically verifiable ledger that customers can
use to build applications that act as a system of record, where multiple
parties are transacting within a centralized, trusted entity. Amazon
QLDB removes the need to build complex audit functionality into a
relational database or rely on the ledger capabilities of a blockchain
framework. Amazon QLDB uses an immutable transactional log, known as a
journal, which tracks each and every application data change and
maintains a complete and verifiable history of changes over time. All
transactions must comply with atomicity, consistency, isolation, and
durability (ACID) to be logged in the journal, which cannot be deleted
or modified. All changes are cryptographically chained and verifiable in
a history that customers can analyze using familiar SQL queries. Amazon
QLDB is serverless, so customers don’t have to provision capacity or
configure read and write limits. They simply create a ledger, define
tables, and Amazon QLDB will automatically scale to support application
demands, and customers pay only for the reads, writes, and storage they
use. And, unlike the ledgers in common blockchain frameworks, Amazon
QLDB doesn’t require distributed consensus, so it can execute two to
three times as many transactions in the same time as common blockchain
frameworks.

“AWS teams have been using Amazon QLDB for years to maintain a complete,
immutable, and append-only journal of data changes. We started out
trying to use relational databases to do this, but quickly found they
could not scale or deliver the performance we needed to support our most
widely-used services,” said Shawn Bice, Vice President, Nonrelational
Databases at AWS. “Earlier this year, when we started talking to
customers about what they needed from a blockchain solution, we realized
that the Amazon QLDB’s ledger technology met a lot of their
requirements. They wanted a centrally-owned ledger that provided an
immutable way to log the transactions history of their applications and
was transparent to all the parties with whom they were interacting. So,
today we’re offering an immutable, transparent, and cryptographically
verifiable ledger, based on the same one that AWS teams have been using
for years at scale, as a fully managed service.”

Smaato, one of the leading online ad exchanges in the world, sees over
20 billion bid requests/day pass through their exchange. “All
participants in the online advertising and real-time bidding market
segments are interested in transparency throughout the entire lifecycle
of an online ad auction, from the initial auction, to the winning bid,
and ultimately through to the final impression delivery and who it’s
actually shown to,” said Ragnar Kruse, CEO, Smaato. “Since we act as a
centralized point of trust in this value chain, we’re really excited
about Amazon QLDB. It offers a scalable, immutable, and
cryptographically verifiable ledger that would allow us to maintain a
complete and auditable record of all our auctions. We’re looking forward
to collaborating with AWS and the Amazon Quantum Ledger Database team to
bring more transparency to our ecosystem.”

Healthdirect Australia is a national, government-owned, not-for-profit
organization that has been helping Australians manage their health and
wellbeing for over a decade. “Healthdirect Australia operates in a
heavily regulated industry, and it is critical that our compliance data
is correct and auditable,” said Bruce Haefele, General Manager,
Technology, Healthdirect Australia. “With Amazon QLDB we look forward to
having a complete and verifiable history of every change in our system,
making it simple to audit when and how we arrived at our current state.
Regulatory compliance is a fact of life for healthcare companies, and
Amazon QLDB enables us to easily track the controls we have in place and
understand how they have changed over time.”

Amazon Managed Blockchain: An easy way to create and manage scalable
blockchain networks (available in preview)

Other customers want the immutable and verifiable capability provided by
a ledger, however they also want to allow multiple parties to transact,
execute contracts, and share data without a trusted central authority.
For this, customers use blockchain frameworks like Ethereum and
Hyperledger Fabric. But setting up these frameworks is hard and time
consuming. Each member of a permissioned network has to provision
hardware, install software, create, and manage certificates for access
control, and configure network settings. As usage of a blockchain
application grows, there is a lot of work involved in scaling the
network, including monitoring resources across all nodes, adding or
removing hardware, and managing the availability of the entire network.
This complexity is the reason many customers typically need the help of
expensive consultants to make blockchain work.

Amazon Managed Blockchain is a new, fully managed blockchain service
that makes it easy and cost-effective for customers to create and manage
secure blockchain networks that can scale to support thousands of
applications running millions of transactions. Amazon Managed Blockchain
supports two popular open source blockchain frameworks, Ethereum and
Hyperledger Fabric, and setting up a blockchain network is as easy as a
few clicks in the AWS Management Console. Customers simply choose their
preferred framework, add network members, and configure the member nodes
that will process transaction requests. Amazon Managed Blockchain takes
care of the rest, creating a blockchain network that can span multiple
AWS accounts with multiple nodes per member, and configuring software,
security, and network settings. For a permissioned network, Amazon
Managed Blockchain secures and manages blockchain network certificates
with AWS Key Management Service, eliminating the need for customers to
set up their own secure key storage.

Amazon Managed Blockchain contains a voting API that allows network
members to quickly vote to add or remove members. And, as application
usage grows, customers can add more capacity to the blockchain network
with a simple API call. Amazon Managed Blockchain offers a range of
instances with different combinations of compute and memory capacity to
give customers the ability to choose the right mix of resources for
their blockchain applications.

Unlike existing blockchain technologies that require custom development
to extract blockchain network activity data, Amazon Managed Blockchain
makes it easy to replicate transactions to Amazon QLDB. This gives
customers the ability to gain advanced insights on how to optimize the
blockchain network by querying the change history of their network.

“Many of our customers want to build applications where multiple parties
can execute transactions without a central, trusted authority, and they
also need to create a blockchain network. Building a scalable blockchain
network with existing technologies is just too hard today, and that’s
why customers pay expensive consultants to help them,” said Rahul Pathak,
General Manager, Amazon Blockchain at AWS. “Amazon Managed Blockchain
eliminates the muck involved in setting up a network, adding and
removing members, and scaling to meet application demands. Customers can
use either Ethereum or Hyperledger Fabric, the two most popular
blockchain frameworks, and get a functioning blockchain network set up
with just a few clicks.”

The Guardian Life Insurance Company is a financial services and
insurance company whose offerings include life and disability insurance,
employee benefits, and dental insurance. “Given our vast partner
ecosystem, we are exploring the decentralization and immutable tracking
benefits of blockchain for potential applications in our insurance
business. We believe blockchain can improve the transparency and
efficiency for stakeholders in these networks to transact, while still
maintaining an independently verifiable lineage of activities,” said
Daniel Johnson, CTO and Head of Innovation, Guardian Life Insurance
Company. “However, blockchain frameworks are complex and difficult to
operate. With Amazon Managed Blockchain, we can now easily create
Hyperledger Fabric blockchain networks to test and learn without
worrying about managing the underlying infrastructure, networking, and
software configuration. We’re also looking forward to the upcoming
integration with Amazon QLDB to enable easy analytics and secure,
off-chain storage for our blockchain network activity.”

“AWS has been a great partner in our journey to innovate in the field of
blockchain, and with Amazon Managed Blockchain, we are able to more
efficiently create a blockchain network and configure our member nodes
in minutes,” said Jon Ruggiero, Senior Vice President, Workday. “AWS’
use of enhanced Hyperledger Fabric enables the blockchain network to be
even more robust, scalable, and easier to manage. We’re excited for what
we’ll be able to accomplish with this service as the number of members
and transaction volumes grow.”

The
Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) provides industry-leading
solutions that promote the stability and certainty of global financial
markets. “As critical financial market infrastructure, the industry
relies on us to provide innovative solutions that reduce risk, increase
transparency and evolve with market and regulatory needs,” said Rob
Palatnick, Managing Director, Chief Technology Architect, DTCC. “We
believe that blockchain technology represents a generational opportunity
to re-imagine post-trade infrastructure. We are pleased to be using
Amazon Managed Blockchain to explore possibilities with Hyperledger
Fabric, where we can continue to lead industry initiatives around the
exploration and adoption of blockchain. Amazon Managed Blockchain
automates the deployment of blockchain infrastructure, bringing high
availability and durability in a fully managed package, accelerating the
adoption of distributed ledger technology.”

Change Healthcare is a leading independent healthcare technology company
that provides data and analytics-driven solutions that reach
approximately 2,100 government and commercial payer connections, 5,500
hospitals, 900,00 physicians, and 33,000 pharmacies. “Change Healthcare
is excited to be the first enterprise healthcare technology company to
test the Amazon Managed Blockchain,” states Aaron Symanski, Chief
Technology Officer, Change Healthcare. “In addition to supporting
Hyperledger Fabric, Amazon Managed Blockchain adds flexible storage and
peer management features that we believe will help scale the blockchain
infrastructure of our Intelligent Healthcare Network™ and achieve our
goal of creating an increasingly coordinated, collaborative, and
efficient healthcare system.”